News from the Earth Institute

Deepest core yet from Imnavait Creek!

Our first day in the field was a wild success! We visited Imnavait Creek Peatland, named for the small stream that drains out of it into the Kuparuk River. We chose this location because it has the potential to be much older than many other peatland sites. During the last ice age, the area of the creek escaped being scoured away by a glacier, so could have been accumulating sediment during that time. Unfortunately, previous attempts to recover cores that reached these old sediments were hindered by equipment failures. This time, we used an auger specially designed to core permafrost soils, and we were able to core more than two meters of sediment, about a half meter more than had previously been achieved. Hopefully the additional sediment will allow us to understand how peat accumulation differs during ice ages. We won’t know exactly how old the sediments are until we get our cores back to the lab and determine their ages using carbon-14 dating. Stay tuned! See a video of us using the permafrost auger below.

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